History

A Bad Check for Black America

Nixon’s embrace of “black capitalism” turned the wealth gap into a wealth chasm.

  • Mehrsa Baradaran

The Untold Story of Mass Incarceration

Reform can’t succeed unless we understand the complex political forces behind the expansion of the carceral state.

  • Vesla M. Weaver

America’s Imperial Unraveling

Could Trump’s repudiation of the Iran Deal be the beginning of the end of U.S. hegemony abroad?

  • Aslı Ü. Bâli
  • Aziz Rana

Schlesinger and the Decline of Liberalism

Schlesinger’s America has vanished, as has his unique brand of liberalism.

  • Andrew J. Bacevich

Disrupting the Conservative Platform

Given today’s economic challenges, some on the right are beginning to embrace a more robust safety net.

  • Mark Muro
  • Clara Hendrickson

The Descent of Democracy

While the United States has expanded its borders of inclusion over time, the borders of whiteness have never fallen. Only a robust black public sphere can change that.

  • Khalil Gibran Muhammad

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Draining the Swamp

Mar-a-Lago is the apotheosis of the Florida Dream in which wealthy interests degrade the environment and hollow out prospects for the poor. But as Hurricane Irma shows, this dream was never sustainable.

  • Julian C. Chambliss

Statue Mania

Focusing only on Confederate monuments misses that racism is memorialized everywhere.

  • Jonathan Beecher Field

Business as Usual: The Long History of Corporate Personhood

Contrary to most narratives, corporations have always been one of the most powerful forces in American political life.

  • Lawrence B. Glickman

Ants Among Elephants

Sujatha Gidla, born an untouchable in India, tells the story of her family.

  • Sujatha Gidla

Mourning in America

Why the left needs melancholy.

  • Peter E. Gordon

The Conservative Con That Gave Us Trumpcare

The American Health Care Act has a long history that returns us to the New Deal and its critics.

  • Lawrence B. Glickman

Trump’s Jacksonian Moment

A biography of Andrew Jackson recounts a bloody history and reveals disturbing parallels with Trump.

  • Richard White

Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia

A biography of Norman Bel Geddes, designer of the Futurama, tells the story of American innovation.

  • John Crowley

Trump’s Latin American Model

The history of Latin America is littered with failed experiments in populism.

  • Pablo Piccato
  • Federico Finchelstein

One Nation Under Gods

Despite what Steve King says, the U.S. was never a Christian nation.

  • Richard White

Lessons from the Nuclear Freeze Movement

It showed how a big-tent coalition can change policy and win elections.

  • Andrew Lanham

On Becoming the Enemy

A family of Jewish refugees remembers Berlin before the war.

  • Jason Stanley

To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice

How the history of slavery prompts us to rethink our notion of justice.

  • Walter Johnson
with responses from
  • Donna Murch
  • Caitlin C. Rosenthal
  • Peter Linebaugh
  • Roberto Gargarella
  • Peter James Hudson
  • Manisha Sinha
  • Samuel Moyn
  • Stephanie Smallwood
  • Andrew Zimmerman
  • Peniel Joseph
  • N. D. B. Connolly

Reagan Used MLK Day to Undermine Racial Justice

The holiday was legislated as part of a strategy to defang King of his most radical qualities while co-opting him into the ideology of colorblindness.

  • Justin Gomer
  • Christopher Petrella

When W. E. B. Du Bois Was “Un-American”

At the height of the McCarthy era, he was punished for trying to keep alive a free and open debate about U.S. military, economic, and foreign policy.

  • Andrew Lanham

Back of the Yards

Lessons from a community organizer on building political power.

  • Michael Gecan

Leftists and Liberals in the Political Heartland

The Clinton-Sanders conflict reveals the contentious history of the Democratic Party—and holds the key to its future.

  • Doug Rossinow

Lost Utopias

Alternatives to Zionism, from the Uganda Scheme to Birobidzhan, present a complex history of the search for a Jewish home.

  • Ezra Glinter
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